What It Feels Like to Cover Gun Violence in America

Since this story appeared in Vogue’s December 2015 issue, there have been 17 mass shootings in America, including the June 2016 rampage at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people, and the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas strip on October 1, 2017, where at least 58 people were killed, and over 500 more were wounded.

“Reports of a shooting at a community college in Oregon.”

My editor is reading aloud from Twitter. In our one-room office with a view of the Empire State Building, I and the other writers and editors at The Trace—a news site dedicated to gun violence and policy—begin refreshing for updates. Reports of someone roaming a school with a gun have become common, but these episodes usually end in arrest, which is what I’m expecting when my editor speaks again. “Ten people dead at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg.”

Here we go. I snap into motion and start gathering details for the stories we’ll be posting over the next few hours. Where’d he get the gun? If he (and it’s almost always a he) armed himself legally—as at least eleven perpetrators of mass shootings since 2009 have done—I want my readers to know that some mechanism along the way failed. I look up the laws in Oregon. How difficult is it to get a firearm there? What are the criteria for obtaining a permit to carry a concealed handgun? Does Oregon prohibit private sales at gun shows?

I keep my eye on Twitter, where stories about acts of heroism by victims and survivors are starting to pop up in my feed. One of the students at Umpqua, Chris Mintz, an Army veteran, was shot seven times after charging the gunman. He is photographed smiling from his hospital bed. One mother tells a reporter that her sixteen-year-old daughter, while inside the school, announced her bullet wound to friends and family via Facebook: “ ‘The effer shot me in the back!’—her word, not mine.” It’s barely a whiff of comic relief, but in the midst of all this death and chaos, a mother apologizing for her daughter’s language is so normal, it almost brings me to tears.

Soon I have the gunman’s name. I’ll want to know if his Facebook profile is filled with hate speech. If it is, I’ll snap screen grabs because Facebook will quickly take it down. Did he detail his plans on an Internet message board? Did the shooter have a criminal record? Some states let you access records online, and others insist you search at county courthouses.

Before I know it, three hours have passed and I haven’t so much as gotten up to get a drink of water. I hadn’t slept well the night before, but I’m not close to tired—a familiar feeling in this line of work. I’ve covered seven massacres since 2012, and each time the emotional toll hits me only when the subway drops me off two blocks from my apartment. With each step my legs become heavier and heavier until I am practically crawling to my front door.

My colleagues and I wait for President Obama’s remarks—the fifteenth time he’s had to speak following a gun rampage during his presidency. “We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months,” the president says with obvious anger and emotion. “It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.”

The president is not the only one making this point. Remarkably, the gunman’s father appears on CNN 48 hours later. “How on earth could he compile thirteen guns?” Ian Mercer wonders aloud to a reporter in an accent that betrays his central British roots. He looks stunned, and his voice is full of despair. “If Chris had not been able to get ahold of thirteen guns, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I watch this clip again and again. Family members of mass murderers usually hide from public scrutiny and anger. (How could they not know? we ask ourselves.) Clearly Mercer is different. Can he atone for what his son did by speaking out against firearms? It takes me two days to realize why the question resonates so powerfully with me.

When I was 22, I did some Internet digging and found out that my father had a past he kept secret from me. We were a loving family, even though we never really put down roots, moving every couple of years, and my parents didn’t like me to share details of our lives with outsiders. This insularity kept the three of us uncommonly close: My mother was like a sister, a confidante with whom I battled over clothes, while my father would sing silly made-up songs as he drove me to school, making me laugh so hard I could barely breathe. I would never have suspected that when he was 26, he had shot and killed a man and served twelve years in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. I learned that John Mascia was a petty criminal from Brooklyn, and one of the members of his drug-dealing crew, a heroin-addicted kid known as Joe Fish, was informing on him to avoid jail time. My father took Joe to a park in Brooklyn just before dawn on May 25, 1963, and shot him to death. He was arrested on his way back to Miami, where he’d just moved with his first wife and their three children.

When I confronted my mother with what I’d found, she told me the rest. It was quite a story: My parents hadn’t met through friends, as they’d always said. My mother, a liberal Jewish do-gooder from Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach neighborhood, had become interested in the prison-reform movement. Along with a contingent of Quakers, she visited upstate New York prisons and talked to inmates—one of whom was my father. She said he looked like he had walked straight out of the Roman Empire, with his distinguished nose and dark, haunting eyes. He was fiercely intelligent and open to refinement. My sophisticated mother decided she could save him.

They married when he got out, in 1975, and I was born two years later. Though my father swore to my mother he’d turn his life around, he fell back into drug dealing and was arrested when I was four months old for having a handgun and cocaine in his car. He faced more prison time and insisted that the only way we could be a family was to flee. So we did, first to Houston, where he bought a mailbox franchise, and then to Irvine, California, where he started a successful carpet cleaning–and–upholstery business after reading a how-to book. We were living under assumed identities all the while—I thought my last name was Cassese—but we’d never been happier. When I was five, however, the FBI found us, and I still remember my mother ordering me to my room while the agents handcuffed my father and took him from our house. She first told me the arrest was a case of mistaken identity, and then when he was returned to prison, she admitted that he’d done something—but wouldn’t tell me what. Within five months he was out again and we resumed our lives.

At a gun range I shot the heart out of several targets and stared through the gaping holes, horrified

My dad had lung cancer when I discovered the truth about his past and I didn’t have the heart to confront him. He died a year later. My mother died of the same disease four years after that. Two weeks before I watched her take her last breath, she confessed that Joe Fish wasn’t my father’s only victim. After he was released from prison and relapsed into criminality—when my mother was pregnant with me—my father shot and killed at least five others. My mother said his victims were drug dealers or clients who owed him money. She had never told anyone and never doubted her decision to stay with my father. And now, facing the end, she unburdened herself.

Suddenly, my whole childhood was revealed to be a lie. I knew my parents were irresponsible—my father always made money but spent it as soon as it came in, and everything was off the books—and I assumed their insistence on keeping certain details of our life from outsiders was some old-school Italian thing. But the truth had been far worse: I was the daughter of a killer and the woman who kept his awful secrets. How could I possibly process that?

I received a kind of answer seven years later, after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That morning I was working at The New York Times, as the editorial assistant to one of the Op-Ed columnists, Joe Nocera. Joe usually writes about business, but as the parent of a young son, he wanted to do something to chase away those feelings of frustration that haunt so many of us after a horrific act of violence. So he gave me an assignment: Find out who gets shot every day in America. What are their stories?

What began with just a couple of entries grew into a 40-item-a-day juggernaut. Joe called it the Gun Report and ran it on his personal Times blog. I wrote about gang-related shootings in major cities like Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and in areas in economic decline, like Detroit and Appalachia. Half of the shootings I looked into resulted from simple arguments—often fueled by alcohol—among friends, neighbors, family members, and romantic partners. I discovered how children find loaded guns in their houses all the time and accidentally shoot themselves, their parents, their siblings. Shootings multiply on weekends and in summer. Stories of kids killed by stray bullets on the Fourth of July or Labor Day were commonplace.

The work felt like climbing a mountain, and I put in long hours. Domestic murders were the most painful to investigate. Over and over I’d be writing about a man killing his wife and their children, and I couldn’t help but think of my own family, and—despite everything I’d learned—how precious my years of happiness with them had been.

I often wonder what my parents would think about my job. It so happens they both spoke harshly about the Second Amendment. I still remember them saying how it was intended for a “well-regulated militia” armed with muskets—not adolescents carrying AR-15s and Glocks. I’d like to think this meant my father came to regret what he’d done and had long ago discarded his firearms—but when my mother died, I found his .22 under her bed. I gave it to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to run ballistics, to see if it had been used in any crimes. To my relief, it hadn’t.

I’d never shot a gun until last March, when, in an effort to better understand the world I’m covering, I trekked up to Connecticut to try semiautomatic rifles that had been banned in New York. Disconcertingly, I discovered I’m an extremely good shot. I confirmed this at Manhattan’s only gun range by shooting the heart out of several targets. As soon as I got outside I unfurled them and stared through the gaping holes, horrified.

At the same range I sat for a four-hour lecture on gun laws, had my photo taken, submitted fingerprints, and underwent a criminal-background check, and a couple of months later I was sent a permit to carry a concealed gun in the state of Utah—a permit that is recognized by 34 states. I wanted to see how easily this could be done. Never once during the process did I have to touch a handgun.

I’ve lived in Harlem for fifteen years, among people who have lost dozens of friends and family members to a bullet. South of Harlem, Manhattan is mostly untouched by gun violence. I step out of my office after a long day of reporting and writing—interviewing, say, a grieving mother who describes her daughter dying in her arms—and the well-dressed crowds strike me as so vibrant and unfettered.

When I started writing the Gun Report, the domestic gun murders would get me choked up. But after I left The New York Times for The Trace, the horror—and the apathy it seems to inspire on the part of our lawmakers—became familiar, and soon it faded into the background. It’s still there, like a distant bell, and sometimes I find I have to spend all of Saturday asleep to recover. And then on the subway Monday morning, I routinely imagine a disaffected loner emerging from the crowd and opening fire.

Given the amount of gun violence in this country, it’s a little amazing that major news organizations still don’t have established beats dedicated to the subject. Some devote resources to special investigations, pitched by veteran reporters with enough clout to cover the topics they want. Here at The Trace, which is funded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, my colleagues and I don’t have to be pulled off a shooting story to cover a budget crisis. Our laser-like focus is nothing less than necessary.

Because this is what we’re up against: There is no government database with the specifics and circumstances of gun deaths and injuries. Access to criminal and gun-permitting records varies wildly state by state—and sometimes county by county. Because of political pressure, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research into gun violence has been frozen for nineteen years, and because of a law pushed by the gun lobby, the ATF can’t release gun-trace data to anyone but law enforcement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is legally obliged to destroy all approved gun-purchaser records within 24 hours. If you think this makes our lives harder, imagine the frustration police, prosecutors, federal agents, and lawmakers must feel.

Little by little, data on gun violence, so long politicized and repressed, are finding their way into the public domain. There’s the six-month-old site I work for, with its mandate to inform the public about firearm injury and death. Other journalists have started their own independent outlets, and amateur statisticians have taken to Reddit, redefining how we count multiple-victim shootings. Numbers I can rattle off—more than 33,000 killed by a gun each year, or 92 a day—are now being echoed by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who has recently put forward bold gun-control proposals.

In the meantime, the violence continues. Days after the Umpqua shooting, a gun-obsessed freshman at Northern Arizona University shot four Delta Chi fraternity brothers, one fatally. Later that morning, a freshman at Texas Southern University was killed and another was wounded after an argument at an apartment near campus—the second shooting at the school that week. As the toll mounts, it takes more and more to truly rattle me. The last time I was stopped in my tracks was when Alison Parker and Adam Ward, a news-reporting team from Virginia, were murdered on live television by their former co-worker—who Tweeted his own footage. It was horrifying, the way the shooter’s Glock came into the frame, then retreated before firing fifteen shots in rapid succession. These are journalists, I kept thinking. My people. I gave in to tears, but only for a minute. I had work to do.